The present application relates generally to monitoring systems and, more particularly, to a conversion system for use in upgrading a monitoring system.
Known machines may exhibit vibrations or other abnormal behavior during operation. One or more sensors may be used to measure and/or monitor such behavior and to determine, for example, an amount of vibration exhibited in a motor drive shaft, a rotational speed of the motor drive shaft, and/or any other suitable operational characteristic of an operating machine or motor. Often, sensors are coupled to a monitoring system that includes a plurality of monitors. At least some known monitoring systems receive signals representative of measurements from one or more sensors, and in response, perform at least one processing step on the signals, prior to transmitting the modified signals to a diagnostic platform that displays the measurements to a user in a format usable by the user.
At least some known machine monitoring systems include a plurality of hardware configuration settings that control the operation of the monitoring system. For example, one or more jumpers may be installed on one or more monitors to control the operation of each monitor and/or the monitoring system. If the monitoring system is upgraded to a monitoring system that is software configurable, each jumper setting and/or hardware setting typically must be recorded and the software configuration settings of the upgraded monitoring system must be individually set. Such a conversion process may be time-consuming, and depending on the number of settings to be set, one or more configuration settings may be erroneously converted. Moreover, one or more hardware components of the monitoring system may not be supported by the upgraded monitoring system. As such, an inquiry may need to be individually conducted for each hardware component to determine if the monitoring system is upgradeable. Such inquiries may be time consuming and may increase the overall time and cost of upgrading known monitoring systems.